Astral to Join OpenAI

https://astral.sh/blog/openai

Astral to join OpenAI

Astral has entered into an agreement to join OpenAI as part of the Codex team.

A concern:

More and more plainly, OpenAI and Anthropic are making plays to own (and lease) the "means of production" in software. OK - I'm a pretty happy renter right now.

As they gobble up previously open software stacks, how viable is it that these stacks remain open? It seems perfectly sensible to me that these providers and their users alike have an interest in further centralizing the dev lifecycle - eg, if Claude-Code or Codex are interfaces to cloud devenvs, then the models can get faster feedback cycles against build / test / etc tooling.

But when the tooling authors are employees of one provider or another, you can bet that those providers will be at least a few versions ahead of the public releases of those build tools, and will enjoy local economies of scale in their pipelines that may not be public at all.

It's not any different from the launch of the FSF. There's a simple solution. If you don't want your lunch eaten by a private equity firm, make sure whatever tool you use is GPL licensed.

> If you don't want your lunch eaten by a private equity firm, make sure whatever tool you use is GPL licensed.

1. For the record: the GPL is entirely dependent on copyright.

2. If AI "clean-room" re-implementations are allow to bypass copyright/licenses, the GPL won't protect you.

If clean-room re-implementations are allowed to bypass copyright/licenses (software) copyright is dead in general?

well no, (clean room )reimplementations of APIs have done since time immemorial. copyright applies to the work itself. if you implement the functionality of X, software copyright protects both!

patents protect ideas, copyright protects artistic expressions of ideas

The problem is that, is it clean room if you read all of the code in advance?